Item 38, The Wounds and the Sins

Item 38, THE WOUNDS AND THE SINS: EXPLANATORY NOTES

Title The incipit, Sequitur septem peccata mortalia, is written in Rate’s regular hand. It begins one-third down the leaf of fol. 150v. The poem has been given various titles by editors, none with any manuscript authority. In C, it is preceded by the incipit “The VII virtues contrarie to the VII dedli synnes.”

13Of a clene meyden I was born. Christ’s virgin birth cannot easily be thought of as a wound like the others in this category, and the Redemption as a whole (alluded to in lines 14–15) seems equally hard to fit into this scheme. Perhaps the poet was thinking of Christ’s Incarnation in human flesh as a kind of wound (in that it was a purely voluntary act of submission). In P, the equivalent of line 15 reads “Alle my body was beten for sin” (Davies’s line 27), which would make this stanza a clearer allusion to the Scourg­ing. Another possibility is that the stanza is the haphazard result of combining the seven “blood-sheddings” of Christ with the five wounds, and that this allusion to the Nativity is a revision of a description of the Circumcision. In a similar poem comparing the seven blood-sheddings with the seven deadly sins, the Circumcision is contrasted with lechery (see poem 123 in C. Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, pp. 218–19).

20Therfor forgyff and be not wroth. The correspondence between the wound in the right hand and the sin of wrath is not entirely clear, though perhaps they are based on the traditional associations of the right hand with agency (and thus vengeance) and the left hand with duplicity (as in Matthew 6:3). But Rosemary Woolf cites this stanza and the following stanza on avarice as an example of the poem’s “lack of congruity in subject matter,” suggesting that there is no reason “why the wound of the right hand should be opposed to wrath and that of the left to avarice (or in­deed why either sin should be opposed to a wounded hand at all)” (English Reli­gious Lyric, p. 224). In Cambridge University Library MS Mm.4.41, the compari­sons are, in fact, reversed, and in P the wound in the right hand is attributed to both sins (see Person, Cambridge Middle English Lyrics, pp. 9–11, 69).

Item 38, THE WOUNDS AND THE SINS: EXPLANATORY NOTES

Title The incipit, Sequitur septem peccata mortalia, is written in Rate’s regular hand. It begins one-third down the leaf of fol. 150v. The poem has been given various titles by editors, none with any manuscript authority. In C, it is preceded by the incipit “The VII virtues contrarie to the VII dedli synnes.”

13Of a clene meyden I was born. Christ’s virgin birth cannot easily be thought of as a wound like the others in this category, and the Redemption as a whole (alluded to in lines 14–15) seems equally hard to fit into this scheme. Perhaps the poet was thinking of Christ’s Incarnation in human flesh as a kind of wound (in that it was a purely voluntary act of submission). In P, the equivalent of line 15 reads “Alle my body was beten for sin” (Davies’s line 27), which would make this stanza a clearer allusion to the Scourg­ing. Another possibility is that the stanza is the haphazard result of combining the seven “blood-sheddings” of Christ with the five wounds, and that this allusion to the Nativity is a revision of a description of the Circumcision. In a similar poem comparing the seven blood-sheddings with the seven deadly sins, the Circumcision is contrasted with lechery (see poem 123 in C. Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, pp. 218–19).

20Therfor forgyff and be not wroth. The correspondence between the wound in the right hand and the sin of wrath is not entirely clear, though perhaps they are based on the traditional associations of the right hand with agency (and thus vengeance) and the left hand with duplicity (as in Matthew 6:3). But Rosemary Woolf cites this stanza and the following stanza on avarice as an example of the poem’s “lack of congruity in subject matter,” suggesting that there is no reason “why the wound of the right hand should be opposed to wrath and that of the left to avarice (or in­deed why either sin should be opposed to a wounded hand at all)” (English Reli­gious Lyric, p. 224). In Cambridge University Library MS Mm.4.41, the compari­sons are, in fact, reversed, and in P the wound in the right hand is attributed to both sins (see Person, Cambridge Middle English Lyrics, pp. 9–11, 69).

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

All TEAMS texts are under copyright, whether in hard copy or in electronic form. The on-line texts provided here are meant for individual use only. To download and make multiple copies for course use, you must have permission from the managing editor of Medieval Institute Publications. | Staff Login